


More Than A Metaphor

by JulisCaesar



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Death, HIV/AIDS, M/M, Non-Explicit Sex, Period Typical Attitudes, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, Suicide, and an assortment of other HP characters but this is a Remus fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-08
Updated: 2017-10-08
Packaged: 2019-01-10 14:13:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12300807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JulisCaesar/pseuds/JulisCaesar
Summary: "Lupin’s condition of lycanthropy was a metaphor for those illnesses that carry a stigma, like HIV and AIDS."Or: Just because one war has ended doesn't mean there's not another, secret one still going.Or: It shouldn't be possible for Remus Lupin's life to suck this much.





	More Than A Metaphor

**Author's Note:**

> I did my research, by which I mean I read _And The Band Played On_ and about 50 BBC websites. Some artistic liberty was taken with realistic response times and attitude of doctors because there's only so much I can bear to write.

1:

Remus Lupin spends October of 1981 undercover with the werewolves, so it’s not until November 15th that he learns that the war is over.

Exceedingly carefully, Professor McGonagall tells him who—and what.

Remus had only ever had four friends, and there’s no good way to deal with learning that three are dead because of the fourth. He goes back to the werewolves instead. They don’t care that he was gone for a week or that he’s silent now that he’s back.

 

It’s March before he decides this is unsustainable. Living with the werewolves means nothing is reliable—not food, not shelter, not clothing. Some of them adjust well to this, but Remus is increasingly longing for a bath and clean clothes. So he leaves, like so many others, just wanders off one day and Apparates to Diagon Alley. He empties his Gringotts vault and exchanges it for Muggle cash.

There turns out to be enough for a couple outfits and an apartment on the outskirts of London. The exchange rate is working in his favour, then: he’s too broke to remain in the wizarding world.

Through some luck and skill and a well-timed Confundus Charm, he gets a job at the local secondary school. It’s alright. He’s teaching literature, which he can fake well enough while he reads the books at night. The children are by turns annoying and delightful, and the administration thinks they’ve gotten their hands on something wonderful. It’s easy enough even to explain that he makes monthly visits to homebound family and will need those days off.

Only…his primary socialization these days is explaining to punk kids what an allegory is, and he doesn’t think that’ll be enough of a salve to the four—three—four holes in his soul.

 

Some discreet questioning and he has a club name. Remus has known he’s gay since he was fifteen and staring at Sirius’s arse every morning, and he thinks—or hopes—that having somewhere where he can at least be a gay, even if he’s still hiding a lot, will help him feel less alone.

The first time he goes to Heaven he doesn’t do anything but stand in the back and watch. Three weeks later another man tells him he’s too cute to be a wallflower, come dance.

They dance.

Turns out the other man has a hotel room just down the street. Remus thinks this is an excellent idea.

They exchange names only as a prelude to removing clothes—the other man is Mark Spencer and he thinks Remus’s name is _hilarious_. He’s laughing as he goes down on Remus and Remus almost ends it. Sirius was always laughing too, and he doesn’t need any more reminders. But Mark is _really good_ at this and it’s not long till Remus would agree to just about anything. There’s a quick discussion about lube, and then Mark is nailing him and Remus stops caring about people he used to be friends with before they turned into murderers.

Remus helps him clean up afterward and gets dressed. This is a one-time thing, not a romance, right? He’s not ready for romance yet.

Mark confesses he’s a flight attendant—hence the hotel room—and isn’t in London often or for long anyway. Remus gives him his address so they can meet up again next time Mark is on a London flight, and then splurges on a cab home.

For his first time with anyone other than Sirius, Remus thinks, that had gone really well.

 

He keeps going to Heaven on Saturday nights and discovers a community he’d never known existed. There are a lot of young gay men in London and it’s easy for Remus to become another one, a little naïve, a little shy, but it turns out some people like that. It’s good. It’s fun.

Not every Saturday leads to sex but a lot do. Remus had never considered himself promiscuous—quite the opposite, actually. Knowing the reputations of both gay men and werewolves, Remus had been strictly monogamous. Only now, without family or close friends, reputation seems less important. He’d rather enjoy himself and try to keep his head screwed on right, even if that means sneaking into London every Saturday night.

The other side of things is harder to deal with. The Ministry offers werewolf cells every full moon, but it means going to them and allowing himself to be locked up. It’s a hard thing to do and it reinforces how lucky he was to go to Hogwarts at all and how horribly alone he is.

For seven years he’d had a group of friends to keep him company day and night. Now all he has is the other werewolves trusting themselves to Ministry care, and there are too many differences between him and them.

Every transformation is an attack on himself. There is nothing Remus hates so much as himself and his inability to see what Sirius was, and so every month he walks out of the cells limping and bleeding. He’d tear himself apart if he could, but there’s little Harry to consider, and so he puts plasters on and teaches his classes and on Saturdays goes to the club and gets laid.

It’s enough to hold him together for years.

 

In 1985, Mark Spencer stops coming to London. Unknown to Remus, he has become another statistic in a San Francisco hospital.

* * *

2:

It’s 1986 before Remus runs into a wizard in the gay scene.

He’s still a bit of a wallflower, honestly, but he never lacks for partners. This one dips him into a kiss when the lights are still flashing and it’s hard to see. It’s not until they pull back that either of them really cares about the other’s face.

Davey Gudgeon and Remus Lupin stare at each other, first in shock, then in awkward silence. After a moment, Remus offers to call a cab so they can go somewhere private and talk. It’s not a good idea, there are so many reasons why it’s not a good idea, but he makes the offer anyway.

Gudgeon accepts.

They end up in Remus’s flat with glasses of whiskey, exchanging stories. Remus hasn’t talked to anyone outside the Ministry since the end of the war, and he hasn’t been getting the _Daily Prophet_. It’s exciting to hear what Gudgeon has to say, and he _really_ wants to know what the Hufflepuff is doing in a Muggle gay club.

It turns out that Gudgeon is doing the same thing Remus is, i.e. looking for quick sex. He has a job at Flourish and Botts and offers Remus a cut on their publications subscription: the _Daily Prophet_ and two weeklies for a galleon a month. Remus doesn’t really have the money to spare but is intrigued about the state of things in wizarding Britain. He agrees.

They transition to fucking fairly quickly, Remus enjoying the novelty of using magic during sex. Gudgeon is a bottom but Remus doesn’t mind switching it up and pounds him into the mattress. The oddest thing about it is how afterward Gudgeon hangs around and they talk about Hogwarts. The old speculation about McGonagall and Hooch comes up again and then they go off about crushes they never acknowledged—they _both_ had a thing for Lucius Malfoy, ratfaced bastard that he is—and inevitably Sirius comes up, but Remus squashes that quickly.

It turns out that there is a small wizarding gay bar just off Knockturn Alley. Gudgeon had been at Heaven because he’d ran through his options there, but Remus considers it. He misses magic and wizards. As it is, the only time he really remembers about his wand is the day before the full moon when he hands it over to Ministry officials.

They fuck again, and then Gudgeon puts his clothes on and leaves. They weren’t close at Hogwarts after all, it’s not like he’s an old friend.

Remus feels weird anyway and doesn’t sleep well.

 

The next full moon brings surprising word of a werewolf potion. Not a cure, but something to dull the wolf and make it harmless. It only takes Remus two days to work up the courage to write a letter to the potioneer and drop it off at the Diagon Alley post office. Then it’s a week’s anxious wait for the answer.

It isn’t good.

The potion has been tested, yes, and it will do what the rumours said, but it’s expensive. With the exchange rate the way it is, Remus is looking at paying a quarter of his total income for thirteen doses. He sits down with paper and pen but can’t make the maths work out. Frustrated and scared, he finds a club he doesn’t usually frequent and picks up a guy.

They go to the other man’s flat and bang there. Remus spends the entire time wishing he could scratch and bite, but he can’t risk infecting a Muggle. It just means he leaves more agitated than he arrived.

 

If your only point of contact for the gay community was weekly visits to clubs for the sole purpose of picking up one night stands, you might be forgiven for missing the changes in behaviour from 1981 to 1990. If you were an introvert by nature and had grown up in a society at war, you might actually completely miss that the community you had found as an adult was also at war.

At war—and losing.

 

Gudgeon introduces Remus to _The Two Wands_ on Knockturn Alley. Wizarding gay culture is a hundred years behind—and many times smaller than—its Muggle cousin. Remus finds the bar small and quiet compared to the Muggle clubs. It’s a nice change though, more laid back and when he goes home with a guy, they chat a bit before and after.

Remus goes home content and is even excited to wake up in the morning for school. Nine years later and he’s still teaching literature at the same secondary school, a comfortable part of the network there. Nobody bothers him anymore about his monthly days off and he’s even made a few friends. Once a week he goes out for drinks with the other English teachers and they complain about their students. It’s fun.

It’s normal.

Since the rest of Remus’s life is gay clubs and turning into a wolf, he thinks he can be forgiven a little normal.

* * *

 

3:

In September of 1991, two things happen. First, there’s a series of _Daily Prophet_ articles about how Harry Potter is starting Hogwarts and every scrap of information the reporters have on him. Remus reads these religiously and saves the articles. He hasn’t had any contact with James’s son since shortly after he was born, but he feels weirdly connected anyway.

The second thing is Remus acquires a hacking cough that won’t go away.

He tries his dad’s potions, and then tries Muggle drugs, but all that happens is one gives him hives. It’s weird: Until now, Remus has been pretty sure wizards are immune to Muggle diseases. But this isn’t like any wizarding sickness he’s ever known. It’s just a cough, and sometimes he’s running a fever.

Just after the new year, the headmaster—lowercase H—pulls him aside. Remus likes him, especially how he’s nothing like the Headmaster in any way. He wants to know if Remus is seeing a doctor. For the cough. And the weight loss.

Remus stares at him before realizing that yes, his clothes do feel loose. It’s not like he was carrying extra weight to begin with, either. He supposes this has reached a concerning level.

At the end of the month he gets an appointment at St Mungo’s. He has an official healer there, thanks to the lycanthropy.

Healer Greene is _baffled_. He has a cough. He has a fever. He’s been losing weight, and sometimes he wakes up covered in sweat. Usually these are secondary symptoms to whatever the illness really is. But this is all that’s wrong with Remus.

Eventually Healer Greene shrugs and sends him home with Throat Soothing Syrup. Until something changes, that’s all she can do.

 

By March, the weight loss has reached worrying levels. One morning he gets out of bed and is too weak to make it to the kitchen. He forces himself to act like it’s the morning after the full moon, and by afternoon he has Flooed to St Mungo’s.

He’s admitted to a short term stay ward immediately. Short term because Healer Greene thinks this is a dehydration problem, and because the full moon is next Wednesday. The healers on call provide him with an array of potions and diagnostic charms, none of which turn up anything new but several do make him feel better.

Two days later he’s dismissed along with a bag full of potions and instructions not to overwork himself. He immediately goes to school.

The headmaster isn’t pleased that he disappeared for three days, but understands that medical emergencies happen. Remus makes apologetic noises to the theme of won’t let it happen again, and is dismissed to teach his classes.

Some of the sixth formers have teamed up to make him a get well soon basket, the sight of which makes him tear up and have to sit down. Eventually he’s able to start a discussion on morality in _Macbeth_ , and the rest of the day passes acceptably.

He doesn’t go to a club that weekend. It’s too much effort.

 

The potions aren’t cure-alls, and they cost more than he can reasonably afford, but they mean nothing really changes until summer, when he’s changing in the bathroom and notices purple spots on his chest.

He goes back to St Mungo’s.

The purple spots are judged innocuous, but Healer Greene is concerned about his shortness of breath. A diagnostic charm finds scarring in his lungs.

They’re both silent for a bit. Remus has never before considered _internal_ scarring. External certainly—he explains his scars to Muggles as a bad accident with a glass window—but he’d always thought of the inside of his body as safe. It’s disconcerting to find out it is anything but.

Healer Greene finally voices her thoughts. The disease he has is not magical, but he is a halfblood. Has he considered seeking Muggle assistance?

He has not. Remus prefers to forget about his mother’s family entirely. Evidently it is a day for unpleasant surprises.

Healer Greene writes him a recommendation to a Muggle healer, someone who specializes in diseases of breathing. He can’t go immediately because of the moon, but two weeks later he leaves school and rides the bus to the specialist.

The specialist is a balding man who breezes through his initial forms and slows down only to ask follow-up questions on the symptoms Remus is experiencing. Remus finds this refreshingly direct.

When he’s done, the specialist taps pen against clipboard for several moments.

“Have you ever had sex with another man?”

Remus cannot imagine what relevance this has. He stumbles out a response about what does it matter, this isn’t his privates being weird, it’s his lungs.

The specialist repeats the question, something sad in the corners of his eyes.

Slowly, grudgingly, Remus says yes.

Remus has seen the expression on the specialist’s face before. It’s the expression worn by people who have to tell others of the death of their family.

“Have you ever heard of a disease called AIDS?”

The specialist explains the acronym and provides some alternative names. If Remus has ever heard them before, it’s only been in passing. He goes to the clubs for a fuck, not to get social commentary.

Slowly and gently, the specialist says he might want to sit down.

“Remus, your symptoms are the result of opportunistic infections. Underneath is a virus that is destroying your immune system. As time passes, you will be sick more often and more seriously. Without treatment, it is very likely the disease will kill you within a year. With treatment…”

The specialist sits down as well, looking very old.

“Perhaps two.”

* * *

4:

Remus is given a prescription for a drug called AZT, as well as more references: to a counsellor, to an AIDS specialist, to a support group.

For several days, he’s not sure whether to follow up on any of them. It seems a cruel act by fate to give him not one, but two chronic and deadly diseases. Perhaps it’s best for everyone if he lets the Muggle one kill him, at least then he can be sure he won’t leave more werewolves in his wake.

The thought arrests him. He has assumed that AIDS is like lycanthropy and not contagious until symptoms appear. What if it isn’t? What if he’s been infecting everyone he goes home with?

He goes down to a payphone and makes an appointment with the counsellor.

 

AZT is hell. So are the never-ending medical appointments to treat the cough—finally diagnosed as pneumonia. The support group and the counsellor help, a little, but the AIDS specialist is blunt and pessimistic. He’s given a timeline of fifteen months, probably less.

Maybe more, but nobody says that out loud.

In September he goes back to teaching, reassured by the specialist’s blunt words. Unless he intends to assault a student, he can’t give them AIDS. He’s extra careful shaving in the mornings, just in case. He worries that any blood would be fatal.

Everything goes fine, though, and now he worries that he was worrying over nothing. A couple colleagues comment on his weight loss, but that’s it. The coughing is mostly gone, to his vast relief. He’s still tired and shaky and teaches sitting down, but he passes for healthy.

He passes, he’s realizing, for a lot of things.

 

Between September of 1982 and September of 1992, Remus Lupin ultimately had sex with around three hundred different men. Two hundred and fifty were Muggles. Of those, some were already infected, some were on their way to being infected, and some got incredibly lucky. Due to the easy access to health care and the vigorous education campaign pursued by the Muggle government, the long term repercussions of Remus Lupin’s actions were small. Most of his partners did develop AIDS, but there is a case to be made for the odds on them developing AIDS without his involvement.

The remaining fifty sexual partners were wizards, and this had a different result altogether.

 

Julius Davenport goes to St Mungo’s demanding entry to the spell damage ward. He has spots on his shoulders, he says loudly, so everyone can hear, and he’s determined they’re from a curse. One of the enemies of his family, no doubt.

The Healer-on-duty sighs and points him towards spell damage. Davenport is a well-known hypochondriac and is in St Mungo’s at least three times a year with some new ailment. His family pays well so the hospital puts up with his hysterics.

The Healer in spell damage looks at his shoulders and tells him he’s spent too much time outside in the summer. It’s skin cancer, but a quick spell clears it up and the Healer sends Davenport on his way.

It’s another normal day at St Mungo’s.

Only…

Over the next four months, Julius Davenport is in and out of St Mungo’s with a variety of unusual but real ailments. Spells can treat the diseases, but the Healers on spell damage are increasingly convinced he was hit with a Wasting Curse in September and there’s an underlying problem they haven’t addressed.

Julius Davenport maintains he hasn’t been illegally duelling and there’s no way anyone could have hit him with a Wasting Curse in September or any other time. Without his permission, they can’t collect the tissue needed for a detection potion, and the Wasting Curse is nastily quiet on any diagnosis charm.

On January 24th, 1993, Julius Davenport deposits himself at St Mungo’s and refuses to leave. He wants to be permanently admitted to a ward since he spends all his time either at the hospital or recovering from a treatment anyway.

The Healers aren’t happy but the Davenports are politically powerful.

It doesn’t matter.

Julius Davenport dies on February 2nd, 1993.

It will be years before anyone realizes he was the first wizarding fatality of AIDS. In 1987, he met Remus Lupin in a shady bar in Knockturn Alley. Betrothed to a woman he had no romantic but plenty of financial interest in, he never mentioned the encounter. Nor did the wizarding Healers know to ask for it.

* * *

5:

In July of 1993, Albus Dumbledore comes to Remus Lupin with an unusual request.

Remus is still skinny, but the AZT is working. His doctors are very pleased with the reduction in opportunistic infections and have given him an updated estimate of one year. He has to take the pills three times a day. They’re obviously helping, so he keeps taking them, but they leave him nauseous and with awful headaches.

He accepts Dumbledore’s request with the condition of weekends off—so he can sneak back to London and pick up another week of pills. Dumbledore agrees.

In September, he is on the train to Hogwarts for the last time.

 

Nasua Montgomery’s baby is sick. He’s been sick almost his entire life: he’s had almost every childhood disease, but worse and for longer. Only the Montgomery family private Healer has kept him alive. Her baby is smaller than he should be too, and weak. At fifteen months he just cries most of the time, tiny sniffling whimpers because that’s all he can produce.

Nasua herself is aware she’s also been getting sick more often than normal. She blames it on the stress of the baby—Reginald, after his grandfather—but she’s beginning to suspect that there’s more to it than that.

Most days now she wakes up with a fever and a headache; she’s constantly tired, too, and it seems worse than it should be, even with the baby.

When she develops chest pain and vomiting, it seems like a natural conclusion. Nasua is aware enough to know that she’s not thinking right anymore. The Healer and her husband talk around her more than they talk to her, these days, and she can’t remember the last time she was left alone with Reginald.

All of that, though, she can explain as part of being a new mother.

Blacking out and falling down the stairs in what her husband describes as a seizure cannot.

She refuses to go to St Mungo’s and absolutely puts her foot down, and they let her stay at home. She spends most of her days in bed now, the fever never goes away, and her husband refuses to let her see Reginald. He’s afraid she’s contagious, but she can never find a way to tell him what she already knows: Whatever she has, the baby already has it.

So does her husband, she realizes. He’s starting to cough and lose weight, too. A house of the dead; a mortuary.

The only question is in what order.

The same day that Sirius Black sneaks into Gryffindor tower using a page of stolen passwords, Reginald dies, not yet two, lungs and brain full of infections the best Healers can’t treat.

Nasua takes her wand and uses it to vanish her own brain. She knows this disease is long and slow, and has no intentions of allowing it to take its time.

Her husband turns to drink, and then illegal drugs, before the disease—given to him by Remus Lupin in a rented room in 1990—catches up to him too.

 

Remus changes several people’s plans at once by collapsing mid lecture in early May. His NEWT students rush him to the hospital wing, and then he gets Flooed to St Mungo’s. The Healers are concerned: Among other problems, Remus’s Muggle doctor hasn’t been in touch with them. As far as they’re concerned, a previously healthy wizard is now wildly underweight and chronically ill.

Remus wakes back up long enough to explain some of it to the closest Healer, then slips out of consciousness again.

Back at Hogwarts, a trio of third year students are asking invasive questions of anyone who will hold still.

The debate over whether to transfer Remus lasts exactly as long as it takes someone to find a calendar. It will, of course, be a tragedy to lose a patient that could have been saved by working with Muggles. But it would be one ten times worse if that patient released lycanthropy into a Muggle hospital.

Instead, an effort is made to find if there are any other wizarding patients with this immune disorder. The results are…unclear.

Yes, there are close to a hundred wizards—and witches, but mostly wizards—displaying what a muggleborn Healer has identified as the key symptoms: Swollen lymph nodes, weight loss, blotchy skin, an unproductive cough. But only two of these wizards know they have a disease at all, and both of them are also muggleborn and seeing Muggle doctors to treat it.

There is a quiet and vicious debate among the Healers over the following days. This is not a magical disease and there is only so much magic can do to treat it. Logically, then, the patients should be turned over to the Muggle hospitals to be treated there.

There are two problems with this, which the more liberal on the St Mungo’s staff like to bring up repeatedly. First, Remus cannot be allowed to return to his Muggle life. No one knows how lycanthropy will interact with AIDS and nobody really wants to find out. Second, and more far reaching: Most of the infected were raised as wizards. They’ve never successfully passed as Muggles before, and there’s no reason to think—as they grow sicker, as they potentially lose their minds—that they will be able to do so under these circumstances.

The conservative members of the St Mungo’s staff bring up budget cuts.

In the end, it’s decided for them: With the announcement that St Mungo’s is looking for wizards with immune problems who know Muggles, wizards with immune problems who _don’t_ know Muggles come out of the woodwork, looking for a cure in the only place that has ever provided one.

Spellweavers create a new floor for St Mungo’s and the Healers announce the opening of the new Muggle Disease ward. The twenty five beds fill up within a week with skinny men with skin cancers and coughs.

Even with round-the-clock care, it doesn’t take very long for the first patients to begin dying.

* * *

6:

Some days Remus wakes up to see a black dog walking out of the ward. He never says anything about it.

By June, the newspapers are full of conflicting reports about events at Hogwarts. Apparently Sirius Black turned up, killed a student’s pet, threatened the student body, and vanished again.

Even to Remus this makes very little sense until finally the _Daily Prophet_ releases an interview from the student in question. The pet was a rat.

Remus grins, and then starts coughing and can’t stop.

The Healers come and do something to his lungs again, but it never lasts very long.

Sirius Black vanishes, and then so does Harry Potter, although that isn’t so widely reported. Remus only knows because Dumbledore came to ask if he had seen or heard anything about Sirius Black, and happened to drop that piece of information in the process.

And Remus gets sicker, and sicker, and sicker.

There’s finally discussion about the disease itself, about AIDS and all its complexities. All of the men there have been to _The Two Wands_. Most of them Remus has had sex with and he has nightmare after nightmare about the consequences of that.

When it’s the full moon, the Healers provide him with a silver cage in St Mungo’s basement. There are discussions about how his diseases are interacting. Remus doesn’t care, for once, because that night is the first time in weeks that he’s felt strong.

It comes at a price. It always does. The day after the full moon, he can’t sit up.

There doesn’t seem to be any end to how sick they can get. The line between life and death grows blurry. Some of them find a way to commit suicide, only to be replaced by near-identical copies. Remus learns there is a waiting list for this ward, and he cries.

A waiting list to die, he explains. They’re all going to die.

 

Harry spends the summer of 1994 fidgety and excited at Grimmauld Place. Sirius is nothing like the Dursleys, and cleaning out his old house is nothing like weeding the garden. Sirius sticks close most of the time, but once a week he leaves and comes back sadder.

Eventually Harry asks him about this.

It turns out Sirius has a friend in St Mungo’s, a friend who is only getting more sick. After a pause, Sirius adds that the friend has an immune disorder. He says the words as if they’re unfamiliar.

Like AIDS, Harry asks. He knows about AIDS. There were rumours in primary school that you could get it from spitting, kissing, touching. Harry isn’t Hermione, but Hermione only ever worked out one of Remus’s diseases, and besides, it’s not hard to get from Sirius has a sick friend in the hospital to that teacher he had who was too sick to finish the year and used to be friends with his dad.

Professor Lupin?

It takes Sirius a moment to get past how _weird_ that is, but yes. Harry is right.

Harry has a lot of questions but he’s pretty sure most of them are rude to ask. Instead he sends a letter to Hermione.

 

Dumbledore worries about the consequences to the war. Fudge worries about an impact in his polling. Malfoy worries that it might have infected him when he was slumming it in the first years after the war ended, and then that it might somehow infect his son. Many people are terrified of being infected; many have only the vaguest idea what might lead to infection.

But for the longest time, very few people worry about what it means for these men, who one after another, get sick and die.

Healer Burbanks, who has been on the ward since the beginning and who is used to chronic spell damage cases, finds herself sitting next to beds day after day, saying words that may be lies, that may be platitudes, but that give these men a strength. And she watches them talk to each other, share mantras that get them through the night or revelations that came with the dawn.

There is, quietly, a seismic shift in how St Mungo’s treats Muggle diseases—and interacts with Muggle doctors. The process of acquiring and paying for AZT is complicated, but worth it, especially when it gives some men the strength to leave the hospital. This is what first alerts Healers to the existence of women—witches—with the disease, and then witches and their infants.

A second ward is announced.

The wizarding community is smaller than the Muggle one, and diseases burn out faster. It is easier for the Ministry to get information to everyone, and by 1996, the rate of infection is dropping. There are simply too few ways for the disease to spread, and too few men having casual sex anymore.

That year, St Mungo’s joins the Muggle world in welcoming a three drug cocktail. It doesn’t, can’t cure AIDS, but it does what nothing else has been able to do: freezes it.

For many, though, 1996 is too late.

Remus Lupin surrenders in late 1995, as Voldemort finally makes himself a new body and some former students begin learning deeper, older magic. He hasn’t left St Mungo’s since May 1994. For Remus, like for so many others, wizard and Muggle, AIDS was a long, slow descent marked only by periods in which it paused.

He leaves behind a wizarding community already torn by losses and already, openly, debating the ideas behind the war. Muggles gave them this disease, but also gave them the means to treat it. The first infected were all Muggleborn and yet—they all went to Muggle doctors for treatment. It took a halfblood to bring the disease to the attention of the wizarding community.

For AIDS and for most things, there are no easy answers or happy endings. There is only a complex, ongoing reality.

For Remus, there is pride in knowing that he lasted longer than anyone expected. He has long since accepted that he was not the only gay wizard in Muggle clubs, only the first identified. He is, at the end, vindictively bitter that he will still, always be known by his disease.

But that morning the paper carried a fluff piece about the Boy-Who-Lived’s boyfriend and Remus thinks that somehow they’ll get through this alright.


End file.
